Once upon a time, Americans celebrated National Brotherhood Week. The message: Reach out to your neighbors. Regardless of race or creed, we are alike under the skin. Frank Sinatra — and Abel Meeropol, a Jew who wrote under the name Lewis Allen — captured that message in “The House I Live In.”
Today we celebrate diversity and have replaced the term “brotherhood” with more inclusive phrases. But too often, we have failed to be inclusive. We have Balkanized ourselves, applauding ourselves and castigating our neighbors.
Lately, some of our neighbors have carried that message into a dangerous direction — “indigenous peoples” good, Israelis bad.
We’ve been kicked out of the rainbow.
That message hit a little too close to home recently when employees at Rainbow Grocery Cooperative singled out Israel for human rights violations, boycotting its goods, and members of San Francisco Women Against Rape took an anti-Zionist stance.
Thankfully, Rainbow’s worker-owners have recognized that anti-Zionism is just another form of discrimination, and it’s not OK. Last week the store’s roughly 190 employees took a positive stand, voting overwhelmingly to defeat boycotts of Israeli goods.
It took a village to defeat that boycott — the work of a campaign started by attorney Ian Zimmerman and strengthened by Grassroots for Israel, the Jewish Community Relations Council and Rabbi Michael Lerner.
Said Steve Berley, the JCRC’s director of Israel programs, the vote proves “that the voice of reason does prevail, even at Rainbow.”
SFWAR, which recently removed the anti-Zionist clause from its volunteer and intern application form, is also meeting with the JCRC.
We are grateful that those steps have been taken, but they are only first steps. We must continue to fight discrimination against Zionists, Israelis, Jews and all peoples. The house we live in must be big enough so that all of us feel safe. America may not be a melting pot, but we cannot allow it to turn into a cauldron of fragmentation and hatred.